Collinear Antenna Testing (indoors)

This is my first serious test. I chose to stay indoors. The antenna was located at one end of the house. I took measurements at 5, 10, 30 and 60 foot intervals. The 30 and 60 foot sections had one and two walls between the test set and the antenna respectively.
The base unit consisted of the 6dbi omni antenna, a wrt54gs v6 loaded with ddwrt build v24SP2 (build 12548M).

 The remote unit is an iPhone 3g running Ciscos GIST test app. It is the only wifi speed test app that runs without an internet connection. There seems to be some variance in the results reported by the app, either due to app/hardware integration, wifi interference, or both. Therefore I ran each distance test 5 times and averaged the speed. Below are some screenshots of the apps functionality.

Loading Screen

Main Screen

During test

Test results

To test the general usability of the antenna, I chose to test at varying transmit powers, starting with the routers default power, 71mw. Each subsequent power increase is shown in the charts below. The maximum transmit power for this particular router is 251mw. The selcted channel of operation is 6. This channel was selected by the Channel: [Auto] configuration on the wireless configuration page.

71mw

100mw

200mw

251mw

 In conclusion, within channel 6, the antenna works best in the 100mw range. Any speed over 100mw became sluggish and generally unresponsive. I am not sure if this is due to the antenna design or limits of the router. It may be that the router can only effectively radiate a given transmit power on one antenna. This has left some questions unanswered. I will build another antenna and run the test again with dual antennas. I suspect that is the solution to the slowdown at higher output.